Question

I have this string:

a:3:{i:0;i:2;i:1;i:3;i:2;i:4;}

I want to get number between “a:” and “:{” that is “3”.
I try to user substr and strpos but no success.
I’m newbie in regex , write this :

preg_match('/a:(.+?):{/', $v);

But its return me 1.
Thanks for any tips.

Answer 1

If you know that a: is always at the beginning of the string, the easiest way is:

$array = explode( ':', $string, 3 );
$number = $array[1];